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Japan crisis renews U.S. nuclear fuel storage debate

Tens of thousands of uranium-laden spent fuel rods, like those at risk of meltdown in Japan, have piled up at Southern California's San Onofre nuclear power plant and other U.S. facilities as government leaders haggle over a solution for long-term storage of the radioactive waste, experts say.

Japan crisis renews U.S. nuclear fuel storage debate

Tens of thousands of uranium-laden spent fuel rods, like those
at risk of meltdown in Japan, have piled up at Southern
California's San Onofre nuclear power plant and other U.S.
facilities as government leaders haggle over a solution for
long-term storage of the radioactive waste, experts say.

Despite operators' assurances that the plants are built to
withstand more than the worst-case threat posed by earthquakes and
tsunamis, nuclear researchers contend that a disaster like that
unfolding at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi plant could happen
here.

"The meltdown occurring at Japanese reactors can happen. ... San
Onofre is near (earthquake) faults that could trigger such an
event," or the plant could be breached by an equipment malfunction
or terrorism, said Daniel Hirsch, a nuclear policy lecturer at UC
Santa Cruz and a member of the nonprofit Committee to Bridge the
Gap, a Sherman Oaks-based nuclear watchdog group.

"The risk is not trivial," he said.

Hirsch is among those critical of continued nuclear power
generation in the United States when the country has no permanent
storage solution for the waste, which takes millions of years to
lose potency.

At U.S. nuclear plants, spent fuel rods are cycled out of
reactors every 18 months or so and placed in deep pools of
circulating water to cool. The process takes seven years or more.
As the pools reach capacity, the rods are moved to dry-cask storage
on site, since there is no national repository.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that spent-fuel
pools in the United States will run out of capacity in 2015.

Dangers, Differences

California's nuclear power plants are at Diablo Canyon near San
Luis Obispo and San Onofre along Interstate 5 in San Diego
County.

There are some differences between the problem plants in Japan
and the two plants in California that could lessen the scale and
severity of a nuclear crisis here, if one should occur, said Denis
Beller, a research professor of nuclear engineering at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

The California reactors, built in the 1980s, are a decade newer,
and backup fuel and generator systems are built higher above sea
level. In addition, the faults they are near are strike-slip
faults, which are less likely to cause tsunamis than the subduction
fault offshore from the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant in Japan.

The Japanese reactors also use uranium mixed with plutonium,
which is less stable and more toxic than uranium alone.

A total of 11,125 spent fuel rod assemblies were stored at
Fukushima Dai-ichi, much more than the radioactive material in the
plant's six active reactors combined, according to Tokyo Electric
Power Co.

At Fukushima, water failed to circulate through the pools, and
the fuel rod casings caught fire, releasing radioactive gases and
particles.

At San Onofre, cooling pools contain 2,452 fuel assemblies. When
they are cool enough, they are moved to the dry casks and sealed in
concrete vaults. The plant began using dry storage in 2003, when
395 spent fuel assemblies were moved from a reactor that operated
from 1968 to 1992.

Diablo Canyon started using dry casks two years ago and so far
has stored 256 fuel assemblies inside the containers, which are
housed 300 feet above sea level, said Paul Flake, a spokesman for
operator Pacific Gas & Electric. The storage program has cost
the utility $100 million.

Across the country, more than half of the 104 plants use dry
storage now, an indication of the pileup of spent fuel rods, Beller
said.

"Those pools have filled up because we never intended to store
them this long. It's very expensive. Plants have to rack and stack
their used nuclear fuel and have another facility they have to
maintain vigilance of," he said.

Hirsch, of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, advocates abandoning
nuclear for more solar power plants that would not suffer much in
an earthquake and aren't vulnerable to terrorism.

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